THEORIES FOR LEARNING WITH EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Introduction In this chapter I outline some of the most relevant established and emerging learning, pedagogical, and educational theories that both inspire and guide our interest in exploiting emerging technologies for distance education applications. While educational theory is often construed by graduate students as a necessary evil of little practical use, required by professors and thesis committees, I have written elsewhere about the value of theory in education development and design (Anderson, 2004b). Summed up by Kurt Lewin’s (1952) famous quote, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” (p. 169), I begin this chapter with a short personal anecdote. During the summer of 2003, I began to see a flood of new Web-based information and communications technologies that could be used to create learning activities in formal education. At that time, I became obsessed with the notion that there must be some sort of rational law that would help educators and instructional designers decide when to use which particular technology. Moreover, the mere fact that a technology is popular for personal or business use provides little evidence that it will be useful in educational contexts. In addition, I was worried (and still am) that the adoption of any new technology, in traditional contexts, is hard work, often disruptive, and will likely have unanticipated consequences. Thus, I was searching for theoretical constructs to guide interventions. I was drawn to thinking about the technologies in the context of Moore’s (1989) description of educational communications as being made up of student-student, student-content, and student-teacher interactions. We had already written (Anderson & Garrison, 1998) about the other three possible interactions — teacher-content, teacher, and content-content — but continued to focus on the ones most relevant to a learning centric view, those that involved students. I created the diagram shown in Figure 2.1 and then had an insight: perhaps these three student interactions were more or less equivalent. Creating very high-quality levels of any one type of interaction would be sufficient to create a high-quality learning experience. If this was the case, the other two interactions could then be reduced or even eliminated, with little or no impact on learning outcomes or learner attitudes. If true, this “learning equivalency theory” could be used to rationalize expenditures in one area, yet allow for time and money savings in the other two. I further speculated that “high levels of more than one of these three modes will likely provide a more satisfying educational experience, though these experiences may not be as cost- or time-effective as less interactive learning sequences” (Anderson, 2003). The problem with this “theory” rests on Popper’s 1968 claim that a good theory is one that can never be proved true, but should be capable of being proved false. I had little idea how to disprove this theory and thus thought its contribution to the field might at best be as an interesting hypothesis and as a rubric for course designers. I was thus very pleasantly surprised to read that Bob Bernard (Bernard et al., 2009) and his colleagues at Concordia University, had thought deeper than I, and had established a set of protocols that allowed them to conduct a meta-analysis of distance education studies designed to validate my contentions. As usual, the number of control group studies in distance education is limited and thus so are the results. However, Bernard et al. (2009) concluded that “when the actual categories of strength were investigated through ANOVA, we found strong support for Anderson’s hypothesis about achievement and less support for his hypothesis concerning attitudes.” Thus, my “equivalency theory” gained some empirical support, and from e-mails I have received from distance educators in a variety of countries, I know the theory has helped both researchers to research and practitioners to design and deliver cost-efficient and learning effective interventions. The remainder of this chapter reviews some of the older and newer theories that I find of most interest and value in my own thinking and practice, and I hope this overview helps the reader to understand and act effectively in the emerging world of online education that we are creating. Categoría:EDUCATION